When we look outside of that on which we depend we ignore our unity; looking outward we see many faces; look inward and all is one head.
PLOTINUSAs in certain combinations so words and in all kinds of music; for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life.
More Plotinus Quotes
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You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.
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From the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body’s experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working.
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One word was uttered and from every side an ear attended and received and there was an effective hearing.
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Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
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Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?
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There is one and the same soul in many bodies.
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Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.
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God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so.
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All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.
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But coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls.
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If someone with the right conduct tries to attain to something that lies outside of it, is his goal not the right conduct.
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Never stop working on your statue until the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, until you see self-mastery enthroned upon its holy seat.
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Now we are become a dual thing, no longer that which we were at first, dormant, and in a sense no longer present.
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We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.
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Intelligence inbound with the entire of reality, not fenced off, integral to that All. […] Then it was as if One voice sounded.
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It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me.
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It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it.
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And this is the life of the Gods, and of Godlike men, a life without love of the world, a flight of the Alone to the Alone.
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Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight, but there is a beauty for the hearing too.
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Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.
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Nature is but an image of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.
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The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky.
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The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him in the noble love of a daughter for a noble father.
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Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?
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The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.
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Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.
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